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Tomas O’Leary is a poet, translator, music-maker, singer, artist, and expressive therapist. His new and selected poems from Lynx House Press is In the Wellspring of the Ear. Previous books of poetry include Fool at the Funeral, The Devil Take a Crooked House, and A Prayer for Everyone. A teacher for many years – college, high school, elementary, adult ed) – he has worked for the past couple of decades with folks who have Alzheimer’s, playing Irish accordion and eliciting cognitive and emotional responses through songs, stories, poems, and free-wheeling conversation. He grew up in Somerville, long before it became the Paris of New England.

Grudges

Tomas O’Leary
— Photo by Lee Post

Calling old grudges to the fore
of a rancorous brain is like licking
ice cream off a zombie’s eyebrow. How alluring
can they be, those personified grotesques
that slog through the precious muck the stout skull
cradles?  If there’s a miracle upon us,
call it memory, the maker of each moment.
To knock it off its bright plateau with
phantom anger, ossified hubris? Well,
that rarely makes for tender self-relations.
And as for folks around, they sense a darkness
that seems misplaced in ceremonies of innocence.
If there’s a lesson in this terse spiel,
it stands to reason grudge does not discern it.
Yet, one deep breath, one reasoned leap—
most any hardcore idiot can learn it.

— Tomas O’Leary

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